Last Words Read online

  classical piano.

  (George, by the way, spent most of his life in the nuthouse. He

  had taken all his clothes off on the crosstown bus and they said don't

  do that, but he did it again two years later. So they put him in Rockland State Hospital, Building 17, diagnosed with dementia praecox.

  He would come home at Thanksgiving and Christmas and play the

  piano. One Thanksgiving he turned to me and said, "I'm an admiral. I sail out of Port Said." He pronounced "Said" as the past tense of

  "say," not with the vowels separated. I thought it was wonderful that

  he'd spent his life in Rockland and claimed to be an admiral. But he

  never told me any more about his seafaring days.)

  Part of my mother's strategy for advancing her life-agenda and

  realizing her material dreams demanded careful control of the development of her children. I don't mean moral guidance or practical life-advice but a code that would make her look good and feel

  18

  HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF GEORGE

  comfortable. "Everything you do is a reflection on me." She was

  obsessed with appearances, utterly dependent on the approval of the

  outside world, in particular that segment of society for whom she

  worked and that met her approval, the ruling class. Her vocabulary

  was full of tripe like "A man is judged by his wife," "When you speak

  you judge yourself," "You are judged by the company you keep."

  Judgment, judgment, judgment. Judgment of others, judgment by

  others.

  The other control factor was guilt—how our behavior made her

  feel. She turned everything into a test of how considerate or inconsiderate we were being. She carried it to melodramatic l e n g t h s infused it with a sense of martyrdom. It wasn't just "I give you

  everything." It was "I trudge home night after night, my arms loaded

  with bundles for you boys, my poor arms loaded with bundles and

  the doctor says I may drop on the spot because my blood pressure is

  185 over 9,000 and the garbage isn't even out." I know lots of people

  heard that shit but there was some extra dimension for me—it was

  frightening. I had the normal need to differentiate from the parent,

  especially one of the opposite sex, but she was repelling me with

  these aspects of her behavior and of her dreams for me.

  When her marriage broke up, her living with a maid on Riverside

  Drive and having nice crystal and all that shit went away. It was unfinished business. I think she wanted me to finish the job. On one

  occasion I overheard her saying to Patrick that he would amount to

  nothing because he was a Carlin and so on, but. . . "I'm going to

  make something out of that little boy in there." It gave me steel. It

  made me determined that she wouldn't make something out of me.

  I would be the one that would make something out of me.

  And yet she was my mother, so she's deep in my art, both for what

  she gave me—especially that love of words—and for what I rebelled

  against in her. And she made me laugh, she had a way with a punch

  line. Once she told Pat and me about coming home on the bus that

  day. A big fat German man plonked down beside her. "A big Hun

  sat next to me," she said, "a big mess! He was taking up far too much

  room. So I took out my hatpin and showed it to him and said: 'Condense yourself!' "

  19

  LAST WORDS

  I'll never forget the moment when I made my mother laugh for

  the first time. That I actually took an idea and twisted it and she

  laughed. And it was real—not just cute-kid stuff. I provoked a laugh

  in her by means of something I thought of. How magic that was, the

  power it gave me.

  Even after I'd made the break—made it pretty clear that I wasn't

  going to let her make something of me—she hung on. She'd find

  excuses to come visit me on the road when I was playing these little nightclubs in the early sixties. She'd show up in Boston or Fort

  Worth or Shreveport. "I just want to see if you have nice linens." By

  then I'd begun to claim my independence and my manhood and

  was able to accommodate that—we hadn't wound up killing each

  other after all.

  But then she showed up on my honeymoon! My partner, Jack

  Burns, and I were working at the Miami Playboy Club, and my

  brand-new wife, Brenda, and I were living at the motel next door—

  and I get a call: "I'm coming down with Agnes" (Agnes was her

  sister). My mother and my maiden aunt on my fucking honeymoon!

  Mary got on well with Brenda. Almost too well. A little later when

  we lived with her in New York—I was getting started on my own

  by now and things were pretty tight—she would often try to drive

  a wedge between Brenda and myself. I would go out drinking with

  the guys from the old neighborhood, and while I slept it off in the

  morning, she'd give Brenda twenty bucks and say, "Go on downtown, and go shopping—don't let him know where you are." Antiman, anti-husband stuff. It was the diametric opposite of the old

  mother-in-law joke.

  As Shannon says, Victorian standards of niceness could be cruel.

  It wasn't just that the linens had to be nice. And while Mary must

  have been dismayed that her son chose the career I did, she made

  the most of it. When I was a regular on Merv G r i f f i n in the midsixties, she came on the show and upstaged everybody—including

  me. In a way I hadn't yet made a break with Mary's niceness. The

  sixties were my nice years, my nice suit, my nice collar, my nice tie,

  my nice haircut—and my nice material.

  When I really made the break in 1970, really put that niceness be2 0

  HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF GEORGE

  hind me, she had a remarkable—but typical—reaction. She came to

  the Bitter End on Bleecker Street right around the time of the FM &

  AM album. I was doing "Seven Words" by then, and so for the first

  time she saw me saying "cocksucker" and "motherfucker" on stage

  and having people laugh and applaud.

  Mary was never a prude. She liked to tell a dirty joke—but she'd

  make believe she felt ashamed and embarrassed. She'd give you a

  look like "Aren't I awful? Am I the bad girl?" and then tell it. But I

  was taking things very far—plus I was attacking two of the things she

  held most dear: religion and commerce. She was mortified that I

  would be rewarded for these attitudes. But she was incredibly happy

  I was successful. It was the payoff. The fulfillment of "Everything

  you do is a reflection on me." She was a star's mother. "Hi—I'm

  Georgie's mother."

  But here's the most telling thing. On the block of 121st Street

  where I grew up was our church, Corpus Christi, and Corpus

  Christi School. It was run by Dominican nuns and they all knew

  Mary. Throughout my nice years the sisters got to know me from

  television; they knew I was an alumnus of Corpus Christi, and my

  mother would visit with them and it would be "Yes, he's doing so

  well," "Yes, I'm so proud of him," "Yes, you should be."

  Now comes shit-piss-cocksucker-tits and God-has-no-power. So

  one day she's walking past the church and runs into a couple of the

  nuns and they comment on the new surge in my popularity and say,

  "Corpus Christi was all over the Class Clown album." So Mar
y says,

  "Yes, but isn't it awful, sisters, the language he's using." And they

  say, "No, don't you see? What he's saying is these words are part of

  the language anyway and they're kept off in their own little section

  and their own little closet. He's trying to liberate us from the way we

  feel about these things." My mother says, "Oh yes, yes, of course."

  She's okay now. She's fine. Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits have just received the imprimatur of Holy Mother

  Church. Now they're nice words.

  When I threw my mother out of my life figuratively as a teenager, I threw out the good with the bad. To make a clean break

  you eliminate everything, but I still find her ambitions hidden in

  2 1

  LAST WORDS

  mine—and they're not necessarily bad. An important goal of mine is

  to do a one-man Broadway show. And it was Mary who used to take

  me to Broadway shows and in the lobby would point to people and

  say: "See that man's hand? Look at that. He's cultured. He's refined.

  Look how he holds his cigarette. Look at the angle of his leg. That's

  what I want for you." In some way my desire to go to Broadway and

  the legitimate stage is to impress the people my mother admired. I

  still have this longing to be Mary's model boy. She is hidden in every

  cranny of my workroom, requiring me to do things. What I have to

  do constantly is to take Mary out of things and leave only myself in

  them. Then decide if I want to do them.

  My mother wanted me to learn the piano. Like her, like Uncle

  George the admiral. And I did take lessons and play at recitals and

  shit, but I hated practicing. I had this dream one night not long

  ago. I'm trying to learn these piano pieces and I'm very frustrated

  because I haven't got time, and I'm trying to learn them. Then right

  there in the dream I say to myself, "Hey, I don't even take piano

  lessons!"

  When I woke up I wrote that down. I stuck it up on the wall of the

  room where I work. Whenever I get goofy and my OCD kicks in, I

  look at it and say: "Mary, Mary! Get out of the room!"

  2 2

  3

  CURIOUS GEORGE

  George Carlin, 1959

  (Courtesy o f Kelly C a r l i n - M c C a l l )

  One blazing Sunday in July 1941, my mother and I and an

  older woman named Bessie, who was our housekeeper,

  went to Mass at Corpus Christi Church on 121st Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. Usually we went to Our Lady of

  Lourdes, a gloomy neo-Gothic barn on 143rd Street, but the good

  Catholic ladies had been attracted to Corpus Christi by its pastor,

  Father George Ford. It wasn't physical attraction, although Father

  Ford was, by contemporary Catholic standards, doing something

  quite indecent. He was delivering intelligent sermons that credited

  his congregation with having minds of their own.

  As well as the church he ran an eponymous parochial school

  of eight grades—an oasis of enlightenment in the wasteland of

  Ascensions, Nativities, Blessed Sacraments and Our Ladies of

  Unbearable Maternal Grief, where retrograde clergy routinely hammered on the bodies and minds of the children entrusted to their

  care.

  After Mass we strolled up the hill toward Amsterdam. There outside 519 West 121st was a sign: "Vacancy—5 Rooms." Just what we

  needed! An address my father didn't know about. And only a few

  doors from a school I could walk to without crossing the street. Of

  course I was only four, so I still had two years to shop for a really cool

  pencil box. Mary always was a visionary.

  Most people would've considered this a random piece of good

  luck, but not Mary Carlin. She pointed out to me many, many times

  afterward that God's mother had been directly responsible for find2 5

  LAST WORDS

  ing our apartment, because we moved in on August 15th, the Feast

  of the Assumption.

  For Catholics the Feast of the Assumption was a Holy Day of

  Obligation, which meant you had to attend Mass on that day or be

  guilty of a mortal sin. I certainly hope we found time to attend Mass,

  because mortal sins are far worse than venial or "regular" sins. If you

  die with a mortal sin on your soul you will burn in inconceivable

  torment in hell for all eternity. Dying with a venial sin on your sheet

  merely costs you a few aeons of flaming agony in purgatory. There

  the fires are as hot as hell but you're consoled by knowing it's only

  for a few hundred thousand million years. God hands out these hideous, agonizing punishments because He loves you.

  The Assumption of Our Lady by the way doesn't mean she assumed she was going to heaven. That would be a sin of pride and

  August 15th would be the Feast of Our Lady's Presumption. Our

  Lady could not commit a sin. She was conceived immaculate,

  meaning "free of the stain of original sin" (which has nothing to

  do with whether your sins display any originality). She was the only

  human ever to give birth without being fertilized by a male sperm—

  otherwise known as the Virgin Birth—the reason being that the

  standard male sperm-delivery system comes very close, in the eyes

  of the Church, to mortal sin. We have to assume—there's that word

  again—that Mary's husband, Joseph, never came close to getting

  into the Immaculate Pants.

  Why Mary the Immaculate had so keen an interest in the living arrangements of Mary the Carlin was never explained, but right

  around the time the United States was laying plans to sucker Japan

  into attacking Pearl Harbor, we three Gypsies (my mother's name

  for herself, Pat and me) plus Bessie tucked ourselves safely away in

  our Morningside Heights apartment.

  We soon discovered we'd moved into one of the greatest neighborhood concentrations of educational, cultural and religious institutions in America. The centerpiece was Columbia University with

  its many colleges, including, just a few yards from my front door,

  Teachers College, from which it was once said every superintendent of schools in America had been graduated. Across Broadway

  2 6

  CURIOUS GEORGE

  was Barnard, one of the Ivy League's Seven Sisters. Down the street

  from our house was Union Theological Seminary, America's foremost training ground for Protestant clergy.

  Two blocks farther west, towering over the neighborhood, was

  Riverside Church, a twenty-eight-story Gothic cathedral endowed

  by the Rockefellers, and known locally as Rockefeller Church (a

  sure sign of what Americans really worship). It soared over our heads

  at the foot of our street—a three-hundred-foot phallus with seventyfour bells in its head, the largest carillon in the world.

  Just around the corner were the Jewish Theological Seminary

  and Juilliard School of Music, where I walked in at the age of ten to

  ask if I could get piano lessons. Close by was International House,

  not of pancakes but of foreign Columbia students; Interchurch Center, HQ of the National Council of Churches, and a few blocks away

  Grant's Tomb, where many a night we smoked pot while that old

  juicer Ulysses and his wife dozed away inside.

  Our neighborhood quickly became a metaphor for my mother's cultural dilemma: the clash between her self-image as a lac
ecurtain businesswoman and the reduced circumstances in which

  her shanty-Irish husband had abandoned her. Downtown, up on the

  hill, was the intellectual center which embodied her cultural aspirations. Uptown, down the hill, on the Broadway which Jesus tells us

  "leads to destruction," lay a mostly Irish neighborhood beginning

  around 123rd Street, known back then as White Harlem.

  White Harlem was tougher and more crowded than the streets

  around Columbia. Its buildings were older and many didn't have elevators. The whole area had a decidedly working-class flavor and, of

  course, was a lot more fun. You can guess in which direction Mary

  wanted her sons to head. And which direction they wanted to head.

  At the beginning she didn't have to worry about me—I was only

  four when we moved into 519. The highlights of my life were my

  trips to midtown with Bessie, listening to the radio and thumbsucking. I was a world-class thumb-sucker. My specialty at bedtime

  was to loosen part of the bottom sheet, wrap it around my thumb

  and cram the whole thing into my mouth for extended, overnight

  sucking. By morning this would create yet another circular, pleated

  2 7

  LAST WORDS

  saliva stain in one corner of the sheet, which must have caused some

  speculation at the local Chinese laundry: "Aha! Irish form of birth

  control! No wonder so many of them!"

  The big old Philco radio in the living room fascinated me from

  the beginning. I couldn't get enough of it. I didn't care what was

  on: quiz shows, soap operas, newscasts, interviews, plays, comedies.

  T hat all these voices could magically enter my house fired my imagination and nurtured my obsession with words, inflections, accents.

  On a more basic level it provided company. I harbored a distinct

  loneliness as a little kid, growing up with no grandparents, no father,

  a part-time mother and a hired friend—Bessie, who, kind, sweet and

  mothering though she was, wasn't blood. My adored older brother—

  the problem child—was away at boarding school. For an embryonic

  loner the radio was deeply associated with warm feelings—comfort,